Voting for the alumni seat on the Yale Corporation will close May 26. No matter who wins,
this election will always be remembered as one of the most heated races ever. Rev. Lee argues that it is
time for New Haven to get a seat on the Yale Corporation. But is this really a...

Partnership Made in Heaven?

Nikki McArthur • Commencement 2002

Recently, the Yale Corporation has
received criticism for its handling of the
upcoming Corporation election. The
Rev. W. David Lee’s (DIV ’93) petition
to be included on
the ballot forced
the Corporation to
run the election
differently than it
has ever been run
before. First, in
order to avoid securing
a victory
for Lee through a
split vote, the Association
of Yale
Alumni (AYA)
proposed only one
candidate, the architect
Maya Lin
’81, ARCH ‘86,
instead of its usual
two to five candidates.
In addition,
the AYA began an
active campaign
against Lee, sending
mail to alumni
warning them of
Lee’s misleading
campaign flyers. Both of these actions
have been condemned by students and
alumni alike as an attempt by the Corporation
to decide elections independent of
the alumni vote. The Corporation made
a poor decision with regard to public
relations in carrying out these actions.
However, it has a very strong case
against the candidacy of Lee that unfortunately
may be ignored due to the unusual
circumstances surrounding the
election.

Lee is surprisingly unqualified for a
position on the Corporation. According
to an article that appeared in the Yale
Daily News on 4/5/02, Lee claimed that
he had “no sense of the Yale Corporation
before this summer and was just sitting
around one day with the Rev. Scott
Marks, the Rev. Lillian Daniel and other
community activists when the idea for
his Corporation bid was born.” Lee’s
first response to the suggestion that he
should run was to claim “anyone could
do the job.” However, as a black man
from New Haven, Lee is
the ideal candidate.
“I wasn’t electing
him, but it
sounded good
to me because
he was a New
Haven man,
and he was
black, and he
sounded very
good,”
claimed
George
Booth, who
signed Lee’s
petition to be
placed on the
ballot last fall.

Unfortunately,
despite
an overwhelming
amount of
rhetoric, Lee has no proposals that he
intends to put before the Corporation if
he is elected. The Yale Daily News
quotes him as claiming, “That’s one
thing I really don’t know, but I do know
one thing – we need to continue to
strengthen the partnership.”

Lee’s repeated mention of a partnership
between New Haven and Yale also
calls his candidacy into question. The
home page of his website, http://
www.yalealum.org, greets the reader
with the slogan “a vision of partnership”
written in bold typeface. Later, in the
welcome to the same site, Lee states that
he “would like to move … further down
[the] path [towards a stronger partnership
between Yale and New Haven] by
helping to build a long-term relationship
of trust and confidence between Yale, its
workers and the local community.”

However, despite Lee’s continual touting
of his plans for an amiable partnership,
his tone is often more adversarial
than conciliatory. For example, Lee was
quoted in September as declaring that
“Levin is probably laughing now but he
won’t laugh after we get there.” Additionally,
in a famous quote, made at a
labor union rally last April, Lee
said that “Yale has met its Waterloo
in the Federation of Hospital and
University Employees. It is indeed
our time.” This kind of attack on
Yale verbally emphasizes not a
partnership but a warlike conflict
between Yale and New Haven residents.
It is clear that despite his
elaborate rhetoric, Lee views Yale
as an enemy of New Haven that
needs to be conquered. A candidacy
conceived with the intention
of defeating Yale should not be
taken seriously.

In addition to the questions
raised by many of Lee’s antagonistic
statements, Lee’s involvement
in the Connecticut Center for a
New Economy (CCNE) also makes
his candidacy problematic. CCNE
is a New Haven group with strong
ties to Yale’s labor unions that recently
began releasing a series of
reports loaded with criticisms of
Yale’s relations with New Haven.
The first of these reports, entitled
“Incubating Biotech: Yale Prospers,
New Haven Waits,” complains
that New Haven residents
are not benefiting from Yale’s
heavy investments in biotechnology
research, calling on Yale to
“make substantial payments to improve
New Haven’s public schools,
so that both biotech companies and
Yale itself can draw upon a more
prepared workforce.”

Another report,
entitled “Schools, Taxes and
Jobs,” makes a more direct attack
on Yale, reminding readers that
Yale’s tax-exempt status causes
New Haven to lose potential revenue
that could
support its
schools. It
cites $12.5
million as the
amount that
Yale would
have to pay in
order for its
contribution to
equal the amount of
revenue that the
City would receive
if Yale’s property
were taxable. In addition,
it states that
the endowment of
Yale University grows an average of
$5.4 million per day, claiming that just
one day of endowment growth would go
a long way towards addressing New
Haven’s need for an additional source of
long-term school funding.

The reports released by CCNE at crucial
points in labor negotiations shamelessly
play on community resentment
both for Yale and for its $10.7 billion
endowment. Far from encouraging partnership,
these reports encourage and exploit
the animosity felt against Yale by
the residents of New Haven. The Rev.
W. David Lee is a vice-president of
CCNE. Although he denies the sponsorship
of CCNE, he endorses an identical
platform, supporting a “partnership” between
Yale and the New Haven community
that is supplemented by a “social
contract” calling for Yale to contribute
funds to lower class sizes in New Haven
public schools, allow card count neutrality
for GESO and the hospital workers,
increase access to jobs for area residents
and expand the Yale Homebuyer Program.

It is not just Lee’s spurious claims of
desiring partnership that throw his candidacy
into doubt. More than anything,
the question of Lee’s loyalty looms large
in any discussion of his qualification.
The CCNE report “Schools, Taxes and
Jobs” makes the statement that “there
cannot be a strong partnership if one of
the partners is weak.” In other words,
even if Lee accomplishes his mission of
establishing a partnership between
Yale and the New Haven
community, he will have
to do this by working to
strengthen New Haven,
not Yale.

Lee’s platform
makes it clear that he is
first concerned with New
Haven and Yale is almost
an afterthought. Electing
Lee to fill the vacant
alumni fellow spot on the
Yale Corporation would
be like electing Yale President
Richard Levin to fill
a spot on the New Haven
town council. For the
same reason that the citizens
of New Haven would
not want the position of a
council representative who is supposed
to represent the interests of
the townspeople filled by a man who
is primarily concerned with the interests
of Yale, the students and
alumni of Yale should not want the
position of a Corporation fellow
who is supposed to represent the
interests of Yale filled by a man who
is primarily concerned with the interests
of New Haven. And it is
clear that Lee intends to represent
New Haven first and foremost.

Lee does his heaviest campaigning
at union rallies and church services.
Amidst choruses of “amens”
and “hallelujahs,” he expounds upon
his idea of “partnership” to the
members of his Varick AME Zion
Church despite the fact that most of
his congregation is ineligible to vote
in this election. (Only Yale alumni
who are more than five years from
their graduation are eligible to participate
in the election.) There is a
problem with any candidate whose
support base is drawn largely from a
group of people that the Yale Corporation
is not designed to represent.

Statements by Lee supporters
have made it even clearer that Reverend
Lee should not be trusted to
represent the interests of Yale. Upon
hearing Lee’s claim that “anyone
could do the job” of being an alumni
fellow, Reverend Lillian Daniel DIV
‘93, a classmate of Lee’s and a member
of the small group of clergy who
dreamed up Lee’s candidacy, responded
by saying, “That is why we have to have
him. This seat is not his seat. This seat
is the New Haven seat.” An April 5th
Yale Daily News article affirms the idea
that the campaign is not about the candidate
himself but about forcing a candidate
who buys into anti-Yale union
rhetoric upon the Yale Corporation. “I
guess if it wasn’t David, we would have
found someone else,” Daniel is quoted
as saying.

In addition to Lee’s position as a vice-president
of CCNE and his connection
to other community leaders who support
groups
that exploit
and
intensify
the hatred
against
Yale fostered
by
New Haven
residents,
Lee’s
loyalty to
Yale has
been
most frequently
called
into question
with
regard to
the
$30,000
contribution
he
received
from
Yale’s labor
unions –
more
than 50% of his total fundraising rewards.
Although he repeatedly claims
that the hefty contribution will not influence
his actions if elected to the Corporation,
that claim is a lot to swallow
given his current political bedfellows.

Lee is garnering votes from both ends
of the political spectrum. Liberals who
buy into Lee’s “social contract” theories
are eager to foist Lee upon a Corporation that they view as excessively secretive
and elitist. On the other hand,
extreme conservatives have been voting
for Lee because they believe that his
election to the Corporation would be the
ultimate consequence of Yale’s exceedingly
liberal policies. Hoping that Lee’s
election will alarm Yale enough to force
it into rethinking
its
liberalism,
these conservatives
claim that a
vote for
Lee is “giving
Yale
what it deserves.”

Unfortunately,
it is clear that
Yale will suffer if
Lee is elected.
The Yale
Corporation
is an
institution
that should
look out
first and
foremost
for the interests
of
Yale. Allowing
a
man to sit
upon the Corporation who not only has
proven himself to be primarily interested
in New Haven but also has actively
engaged in intensifying the animosity
between Yale and New Haven for his
own personal gain is a step towards the
decline of Yale.